CROSS-COUNTRY CORVETTE

for Conde Nast Traveler Magazine

by Stephan Wilkinson

FANTASY: ACROSS THE breadth and much of the length of the United
States on back roads, driving a hyperactive 145-mph red roadster
that would turn pretty heads, smoke its fat tires, color me gone
and generally function as a rolling fountain of youth.

Reality: the Chevrolet Corvette has no trunk. None. As I
scratched around what should have been the bootlid and succeeded
in opening nothing bigger than the gas-cap door, my packing plans
rapidly changed. Rain or sun, my bags would be fewer and would
ride in the breeze, bungeed to a luggage rack like an Okie's
wardrobe.

Reality will doubtless intrude upon fantasy again in the two
weeks to come, for I've never driven cross-country. Flown it
innumerable times in airplanes large and tiny, coursed many of
its highways in convenient chunks, fancied myself a
been-in-every-state-but-Idaho sophisticate. But always I've
known the drive is different. For kids with their life's belongings
starting new jobs, for tourists from Liverpool or Rome or
Tokyo marveling at all that space, for lonely souls in Mustangs
and families in station wagons and retirees holding them all up
in their poke-along RVs, the great coast-to-coast drive is the
elemental American voyage of discovery.

What do they learn? I'd wager few can say, though something
changes from coast to coast. Safer, perhaps, to say what they
feel: happy, ruminative, curious, content, unfettered and foot-loose
and free. All these I want to feel, but are there lessons
in the trip as well? Do the small towns and anonymous cities we
look down on from 41,000 feet, delicate as symbols on a map, hold
elemental truths from which we're insulated by eight miles of
atmosphere and a Boeing's aluminum?

There's only one way to find out.

"WELCOME TO Pennsylvania," the billboard says. "America starts
here." Sorry, New York. Tough darts, New Jersey. Yet for me,
the boast has a certain relevance. Starting a trip on your
doorstep, along familiar roads, is like driving to the grocery
store all day long. Pennsylvania doesn't come a moment too soon.

The plan is to drive as much of the trip as possible on back
roads and secondary highways. Avoid the brain-deadening Interstates.
No eating anywhere one orders by speaking into a sign.
Stay in a different kind of hotel, motel, inn or B&B every night,
resorting to chain palaces only in extremis.

Most important, have an eclectic destination every night,
not just the jungle of franchise neon at Interchange 38. This
trip would almost never take up a heading of west. Instead, it
would progress intently from point to point: south to Natchez one
day and north to Durango another, veering crazily across Texas to
touch Amarillo after dipping to the Gulf of Mexico simply to have
lunch with a dear old friend in Beaumont.

Right now, the destination is Hershey, Pennsylvania--a town
with streetlights shaped like Kisses, air that reeks of chocolate
and an unlikely grand hotel. En route to the Chocolate Capital
lie the Bologna Capital (Lebanon, Pennsylvania), the Pretzel
Capital (Lititz) and a delicatessen's-worth of other Penn-Dutch
food duchies.

Emboldened by the region's alimentary focus, I brake for
lunch at a Reading diner that styles itself a "Family
Restaurant"--one of those eateries with enormous tryptich menus
that suggest a hangarful of ethnic chefs, a vast League of Nations
laboring to create the hundreds of dishes and sandwiches
offered. Road Rule 1: avoid restaurants with the word "Family"
on their marquees. It means they serve families, or perhaps are
owned by one, but has nothing to do with home cooking.

It's raining, traffic is achingly slow, and I'm reconsidering
the wisdom of my no-Interstates plan. Coasting through the
mundanity of Allentown, Reading and Wyomissing offers none of the
idle fascination of driving through urban Finland, say, and
thinking, "So this is what the suburbs of Helsinki look like."
At this rate, I'll be a month making LA. But with the scent of
cocoa beans in the air, at least I've made it to Hershey, the
ultimate company town.

Can any other city have so adroitly marketed the fact that
there's a factory looming over its main street? Chocolate World,
the Hotel Hershey, Hersheypark, a zoo, tankerloads of brown paint
splashed everywhere...it's a shame chocolate isn't a gayer color,
so that Hershey could look farther than the local UPS truck for
its basic color schemes. But imagine Heinz making a tourist
destination of Ketchup World, or Toro bringing them by the busload
to Mowerpark, and you have a hint of the genius behind
Hershey.

The Hotel Hershey is an equally adroit product--a careful
blend of apparent luxury and affordable economy. The small,
rather spare rooms are expensive enough to seem special but not
priced beyond a wide market; the lobby is a Moorish aberration
that veers wildly between kitsch, camp and fanciful artisanry;
and the entire hotel bears the imprimateur of the National Historic
Register.

THE NEXT DAY, the Pennsylvania sky is as crisp as a piece of
Melba toast, and for the first time, the Corvette roadster's
top comes down. The air is dotted with hunting hawks scudding along
on the spring breeze, balancing and correcting like tightrope
walkers, and huge, sky- darkening clouds of starlings [?] drift
and wheel precisely in answer to some mystically shared choreography.

On a day like this, a country in recession, cringing under
an ozone hole while it can do no more than wait till Kuwait's
wells burn dry, can look mighty prosperous. Oversize flags flap
everywhere, greensward rings the bastions of corporate enterprise
dotted throughout Pennsylvania, and enormous numbers of cars,
endless cars, attest to our constant peregrinity. "We're all
imprinted with the cliche about America's love affair with the
automobile," automotive doyen David E. Davis recently wrote, "but
America has no love affair with the automobile. Europeans love
their cars. Americans put up with them. America loves mobility,
and the automobile just happens to provide it."

Going south toward Gettysburg, I pass a woman reading a
magazine propped against her steering wheel as she flirts with
mobility. She is doing the 55-mph speed limit and doubtless
considers me the fool as I pass her at 70.

"From New York? Oh, you'll find New York monuments everywhere,"
says the volunteer guide at the Gettysburg Battlefield.
"Down there is a big monument to the 90th Ulster, up there a
Brooklyn regiment, over there a statue of Abner Doubleday, the
baseball man. He was killed here." The insularity of a country
less than a lifetime away from the mobility that would make it a
nation is plain in the forest of monuments to individuals and
units, battalions and entire armies: the Boston this and the
Virginia that, the Providence Volunteers and the 20th Maine.

Today, regionalism is more in the mind than fact, I'll
increasingly find--a matter of accent and geography, but otherwise
it's a surprisingly homogeneous country. Even though New
Mexicans traveling in other states continue to be infuriated by
postal employees who tell them they need foreign-mail postage to
write home.

I'm doing the dolt's tour--the 18-mile drive-through of the
battlefield--but it has already become obvious that you either
drive to California or explore all the byways. But you don't do
both; it's a big country.

The Skyline Drive to the day's destination--Charlottesville,
Virginia--is another roller, fortunately, and a topless Corvette
on a traffic-less spring day might just be the perfect car with
which to do it. It's no accident that the 105-mile-long road
through Shenandoah National Park is on everybody's short list of
the country's best scenic highways. Spring floods the cockpit,
and the frequent overlooks offer vistas generally available only
to aviators--fascinating juxtapositions of mountain highway and,
far below, tiny Monopoly houses on fertile valley
farmland.
It's impossible not to wonder if the people way down there ever
give a thought to the thousands of Skyline Drivers constantly
peering down their chimneys.

At a small worksite along the Drive, the flagman lifts his
hardhat and salutes the Corvette with a big smile as it rumbles
past. There's something about this car--perhaps simply
its home-grown, good-natured, heartbeat-of-America
swagger--that elicits responses no effete Porsche, Mitsubishi or Jaguar could
ever hope to provoke.

Sign on a bus en route to Monticello: Van Go Tours. It's
where I'm going too, high on a hill above Charlottesville, and
Thomas Jefferson's beloved country home--perhaps the first example
of truly American architecture--comes as a shock: it's so
small. Has a lifetime of seeing it on nickels made the domed
mansion loom that much larger in my mind?

Another revelation is that the brilliant ex-President who
I'd always imagined to be the esssence of civilized elegance was
also the prototype of generations of Great American Toolmen--the
slightly inept do-it-yourselfers who cruise the Sears screwdriver
displays on Saturday mornings and think in terms of "projects."
Jefferson altered, added, tore down, remodeled and generally
puttered with Monticello constantly, and at times his family
spent bitter winters in not-yet-roofed rooms. In 1804, one
visitor noticed that the pediment of one of the famous porticos
was propped up by the trunks of four small trees, and another
found the house "in a state of commencement of decay, Virginia
being the only country as far as I know where the inhabitants
contrive to bring these two extremes as near to each other as
possible by inhabiting an unfinished house till it is falling
about their ears."

Not so the Silver Thatch Inn, a handsomely restored 18th
century clapboard house just north of Charlottesville where I
dine splendidly and sleep in a four-poster. On a nearby highway
are a Sheraton and a Marriott, for too few travelers are fully
aware of superb country inns and bed-and-breakfasts, and many are
unwilling to accept the unpredictability they represent. They
don't know what they're missing, but with only seven rooms at the
Silver Thatch, there wouldn't be room for them anyway.

RAIN POUNDS THE Corvette's vinyl top like pebbles on a drumskin
as Interstate 64 creeps through thick, billowing mist toward the
Blue Ridge Parkway, which begins where the Skyline Drive ends,
west of Charlottesville. "Avoid the parkway in fog, snow and
ice," the sign says. Good: that means there won't be any traffic.

The Blue Ridge is almost Japanese in its foggy
intensity--strange, contorted pines, twisted, windblown trees
looming suddenly out of the grayness. A stooped old woman,
shrouded to her nose, is plodding through the downpour, almost an
apparation. The highway is deserted, no habitation for miles,
but she ignores me.

The Parkway is 469 miles long. After about 35 miles--an
hour's travel, in these conditions--I've seen enough fog. Seeing
the Blue Ridge will have to await another day, and I put the
Corvette's nose down and descend the ridges to Interstate 81,
where enormous trucks kick water in my face and make me glad this
is only temporary. All that the rainy day promises is
Knoxville by dinnertime.

In Wytheville, Virginia, the radio somberly reports, someone
has been passing $20 bills "made on a high-quality office copying
machine." There has been a tornado in Douglaston, Alabama,
and a garage owner is interviewed. "Blew my son slap across the
shop," he says. Surrounding such pearls are soggy oysters of
religious programming, for thus beginneth the Bible Belt. "I
feel halfway to heaven when I'm down on my knees and Jesus and I
are alone," a gospel singer wails. I need a microchip that will
automatically set the radio to scanning for a new station every
time is senses the word "Jesus." I'm sure the Japanese could
help.

Yesterday, I passed a convoy of automobiles and pickup
trucks towing long, thin trailers housing enormously expensive
sailplanes. (The trailers are bland metal baguettes on wheels,
the sailplanes' wings stowed alongside their fuselages, but the
rudders stick up into a revealing little sail-like appendages at
the rear of each trailer.) Today, I'm passed by a rolling stable
full of horses, its roof covered by wiry, fragile-looking racing
sulkies. It's oddly reassuring: no nation still involved in such
wonderfully pointless forms of sport can be all bad.

Suckered by a highway billboard giving directions to Knoxville's
Hyatt Regency, a grimy concrete ziggurat that appears to
be a leftover from the city's disastrously optimistic World's
Fair, I check in unaware that the big event this Friday night is
a junior-high basketball tournament. The key won't work, the gym
is barely equipped, and short basketball fans perform endless
team cheers in the lobby--a space as large and empty as the
Hindenburg's hangar--until two in the morning.

There is another kind of comfort I've already fallen into as
well: wherever I go now, the top-down Corvette is parked open,
unlocked, bag and baggage naked on the luggage rack. Doubtless
it's naive of me, but people everywhere are so friendly and
accepting that there's a pervasive sense this is a heartland of
honesty and self-respect. Suspicion, rudeness and venality seem
somewhere behind me--or far ahead: in Palm Springs, California,
the Corvette remains untouched, but the Honda Prelude parked next
to it overnight is trashed, a window broken and its front seat
ripped out.

At the airport in Tullahoma, Tennessee sits one of the
country's most obsessive small museums, open only on weekend
afternoons between March and October. It's a shrine to one of
the most unusual and revolutionary biplanes ever built, the Beech
Staggerwing. If a pit bull had wings, this is what it might look
like. The Stag was the Learjet of its day--the 1930s, though a
few were built during and immediately after world War
II--and to own one was to demonstrate that you were rich, brave and avantgarde.

Today there are only about 150 Staggerwings flying, worth as
much as a quarter of a million dollars apiece. Collectors bring
them to the museum's shop to have them rebuilt alongside
the foundations's own restorations--the current project involves
reconstructing a complete airplane from the few bits that remain
of the first Staggerwing ever built, in 1932--so there are usually
at least half a dozen of the biplanes in the shop, exhibit
hall and ancillary hangars. "A lot of them are going to European
collectors, with the dollar so soft," museum aide Bobbie Graves
says, "In fact the Porsche Company owns one. We've got another
one in the shop getting ready to go to England, and you know
it'll never come back."

Not far down the road--two-lane Tennessee 55--is another
obsessive attraction: Lynchburg, the six-pack Sonoma, a town
entirely devoted to the worship of a whiskey called Jack Daniel's.
It's a living Bartles & Jaymes commercial, full of sloping
hounds and men in feed caps. (Kinky Friedman said of Texans
something that could be modified to apply to Lynchburg, Tennessee
as well: "The only thing Jews and Texans have in common is that
they wear hats indoors and take it very seriously.")

They'll take you on a tour of the odiferous old distillery,
sell you every variety of artifact imprinted with the Jack Daniel's
label, feed you whiskey-flavored hamburgers, even supply
you with barbecue briquets made of the charcoal through which the
whiskey has been filtered. But they won't sell a bottle. Lynchburg
is in a dry county. In small towns like Lynchburg,
it's hard to avoid the fact that Americans feel a lot better
about themselves as a result of the Gulf war. Flags, yellow
ribbons and support-our-troops signs are everywhere. But I'll
see one in Texas that says, "We Support Those Who Defend
America." And in a hotel room in New Mexico, I'll listen to a
musician describing a TV concert "for all our troops who fought
to save America." Both are rather extreme assesments of Iraq's
might, but maybe we just have to go out and beat on someone once
in awhile.

Russellville, Alabama: the girl in the gas station says
"Y'all come back," with an intensity never communicated by the
Haveaniceday crowd.

THE NATCHEZ TRACE Parkway is another of America's classic scenic
roads, so who am I to blow against the wind? Early on a sunny,
top-down Easter Sunday, the Corvette takes to the Trace at Tupelo,
Mississippi. A third of the Parkway is north of Tupelo,
stretching toward Nashville, but the southern 266 miles to
Natchez will be our lot. The highway follows what was once a
footpath--established by Native American hunters, tramped
by European explorers and settlers, and finally worn into a 10-foot-wide
forest furrow by the boots of farmers who'd floated their
crops down the Mississippi to Natchez and walked back north by
the countless thousands.

The Trace's dozens of historic sites, overlooks and pulloffs
are contemplative, ill-served by the drive-through dolt on
his way to California. But there can be few lovelier, more compulsively
landscaped roads than the Trace, even if it is flat and
relatively vista-less. In places, it runs past sweeping fields,
and in others through corridors of pine and purple wisteria and
alongside tea-dark cypress swamps. Here and there, the original
Trace is apparent--a gloomy, well-sunken path through eerie
glades that swallowed many a Kentucky boatman.

The hoop-skirt Mafia has taken over Natchez, for I've blundered
into Spring Pilgrimage, when many of the the city's restored
plantations and town houses are open, hosted by period-costumed
garden-club ladies. (Why don't you get your husbands
to dress up in Rhett Butler duds and help out, I ask one. "Oh,
they're much too busy," she says sweetly, "and you know, weekends
they have their own things to do." Last year's Spring Pilgrimage
netted the Natchez Garden Club $000,000 in three weeks--a tidy
month's profit for any man's company.)

Virginia Beltzhoover Morrison, dressed like a lifesize
Christmas- tree ornament, shows me Green Leaves, the memorabilia-cluttered
mansion where she was born. "Do I mind having my
picture taken?" she laughs. "I've been doing this since 1932.
My sister and I used to compete to see who got the most pictures
taken of them, and I must admit I used to cheat and ask people to
take my picture. No, I don't mind a bit."

"For Sale," says the big sign at the entrance to "America's
most haunted house"--the Myrtles plantation--in St. Francisville,
Louisiana. It's not the best marketing for an expensive inn, but
I've never slept in a house where five murders were committed and
a total of 10 people died violently. For $130, I take the bridal
suite. (Lesser rooms are in a converted, motel-like
outbuilding.) Another $30 gets a dinner-by- candlelight reservation,
but no amount of money can make the ghost of Chloe appear
in my slightly seedy room.

Chloe was the black mistress of a long-ago Myrtles owner,
who caught her listening one night at his bedroom keyhole.
Furious, he cut off her ear. She poisoned his wife and two
children--not for revenge, oddly, but to regain her lover's
respect by appearing to then "save them." But either the antidote
didn't work or the poison was too powerful, and they died.
Chloe is said to wander the halls wearing a bandanna to cover her
missing ear, and suggestible guests reportedly insist they've had
conversations with her.

An automatic Yamaha player piano rollicks ghostily among the
antiques in the decaying manor, but the real ghost of the Myrtles
turns out to be the inn owner, a young man who apparently wants
nothing to do with his several guests and brushes past impatiently.
"He made me feel like a redheaded stepchild," gripes an
pretty young woman from Tennessee at breakfast the next morning.

YOU KNOW YOU'RE in the heartland when coin machines in gas-station
men's rooms dispense for 50 cents your choice of condoms
or--here in backroads Louisiana on the way to backroads East
Texas--"totally nude live pussy shots." [Delia et al:
this whole paragraph may be simply too raunchy to use at
all--maybe you had to be there--but it could be softened a bit my making it
read, "'totally nude live' female-genitalia photographs."] The
description is admittedly complete, but even Bret Easton Ellis
daren't consider the necrophiliac alternatives. Nor do I have
change, and I'm too embarrassed to ask for any.

Louisiana 190 toward Beaumont, Texas is so endless and
straight that it simply disappears into glassy, mirage-like heat
shimmers, and the telephone poles march ahead into nothingness.
Highway 190 is empty, a virtual Corvette flyway, and here the
country first begins to suggest the bleak, stretch-on-forever
immensity that it will increasingly become.

In Beaumont, a young black man in work clothes is drawn to
the Corvette when I open the huge hood to check the oil, revealing
engine, wheels, suspension, plumbing--the entire naked front
of the car. "Aw, I love Corvettes. Aw man, you really gonna
torture me?" he says when I tell him to try on for size the soft-leather,
six-way-power, lumbar- supported, inflatable-bolstered
driver's seat. He knows the car far better than I do, and recites
history and specifications. "The twin- turbo Callaway
Corvette, that's the one I want, if I'm ever rich enough to
afford it. In red or white."

Yet what is far more interesting about the encounter is that
this is the first black I've really seen on a trip that has taken
me through a considerable slice of the East and the South.
Certainly I've driven through towns with black populations, but
the lily-whiteness of Traveling America is dismaying, and it will
continue to be obvious through Texas, the Southwest and well into
California.

The doubtless superficial though troubling conclusion is
that only a tiny proportion of blacks can afford the leisure-time
freedoms that the vast middle class takes for granted. That
blacks are in the cities, or at work, or crushed by recession.
Certainly they aren't visiting Hershey or taking Jack Daniel's
tours, or traveling to Monticello and other slave-holder mansions
(Why would they want to?), or stopping at inns and motels along
the tourist trails.

Every road trip needs a little combat driving to relieve the
monotony, so this must be Houston. It's odd to be arrowing
toward this sudden, immense clump of mirrored high-rises looming
in a strangely San Francisco-ish manner from the Texas flatlands,
after days of two-lane blacktop and two-story motels. Cut-and-thrust
Houston freeway driving is fast-moving and aggressive.
The real hardnoses slide through small gaps and across three
lanes at a time, just as though they'd trained on Manhattan's
West Side Drive. Except that many have pickup trucks. The I-59
freeway dumps me off just before rush hour--ahead, taillights are
already glowing as they brake for the afternoon's first traffic
jam-- within several blocks of one of the most remarkable hotels
in the United States: the six-room La Colombe D'Or.

Houston has no zoning laws and has grown william-nilliam, so
it's no surprise that La Colombe D'Or is just down the street
from a Jack in the Box and sandwiched between two anonymous glass
office buildings. But it is an auberge, a chateau, a
chalet, an inn of the highest quality nonetheless. Once the 21-room mansion
of Walter Fondren, founder of what is today called
Exxon, now--take your pick--it is either an incredible restaurant with a
few luxury suites upstairs or an intimate hotel that happens to
have the best food in Houston.

"The bankers told me I was a lunatic. Who opens a six-room
hotel in Houston?" says Stephen Zimmerman, a frenetic ex-lawyer
who bought the mansion in 1979. "I knew I couldn't out-big the
other hotels, but I knew they couldn't out-little me." Zimmerman
reaped enormous publicity in 1986 when La Colombe D'Or offered
full four-course power lunches for the price of a barrel of oil,
which at that point was heading toward Pizza Hut levels. (With a
computer terminal in the restaurant, diners could negotiate their
check based on the spot price.)

Zimmerman is remodeling the already sumptuous suites "as
drop-dead rooms to appeal to CEOs. I want the people who are
staying at the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons to say, 'It's
nice, but I couldn't get a room at La Colombe D'Or.'"

DAY'S A REST: Wash the car. Stroll through the Houston
Museum of Fine Arts, the sculpture garden and the Comtemporary
Art Museum (all within walking distance of La Colombe D'Or).
Then put in an easy 170 miles to Austin. At the car wash, a
young Frenchman says, "If you 'ave thees car in Frahnce, you be
vairy populair." He is a sous-chef at one of La Colombe's competitors
and drives a very un-French but doubtless populair
Mercury Cougar with gold mag wheels.

On the way to Austin, I fall into the trap that entices many
an unwary Easterner: the cowboy-boot store. In Giddings, the
Rhodes Boot Co.--"lowest prices clean restrooms"--snares me on
Texas 290, and 30 minutes later I lope out wearing a high-heeled
pair of $180 snakeskin Hondos, looking like Don Knotts imitating
Dwight Yoakum.

Quenten Rhodes, John Wayne-tall, looks like he's been selling
boots all his life. But until last year, he'd worked for a
natural-gas company, then got laid off. "I'd always kinda wanted
a Western store," he admits. Did it scare him to open one in the
middle of a recession? "It sure did, but I have a brother who
has a boot store, and it gave me a little bit of a feel for the
business." Another customer interrupts. "Is this a lady's
boot?" she asks. "It is if a lady's wearing it," Rhodes smiles,
proving that he indeed does have the feel.

A country-music zealot, I've been looking forward to Austin,
where, Waylon Jennings assured me, "Bob Wills is still the king."
Yo Waylon: they don't even know who Bob Wills is any more. Sixth
Street, the city's club row, is wall-to-wall jazz, heavy metal,
rock and reggae. I ask advice of a man in white boots and tight
jeans (probably a microchip engineer at the Motorola factory in
Silicon Gulch, outside the city). "Country on Sixth Street?" he
laughs. "It's been awhile. This is a college town."

I turn to the young doorman at the hotel--the Driskell, a
historic, ornate, handsomely restored pile smack downtown. "I
had a pair of cowboy boots when I was five, but they were just
for play," he says snottily. "You have to go to the Midwest
to find people who wear cowboy boots and listen to country music
today." My snakeskins peek out from under my Wranglers,
setting off boot alarms all over the hotel.

TODAY AN ENTIRELY new, classically Western landscape begins, and
like so many geographic transitions on this trip, it's instant
and unmistakeable. Near Lampasas, the Corvette crests a rise.
Well behind is the urban sprawl of Austin, nearer astern the
fertile, dairy-cow green of the Texas Hill Country. Ahead a
vista of blue uplands barely seen in the distance, enormous
horizons, seemingly untouched harsh land furred with mesquite and
sage.

The towns begin to look like leftover sets for The Last
Picture Show. The little stripper wells all sit dormant in the
fields, for the price of oil is still too low to make it worthwhile
to harvest what's down there. Even the few that are running
are connected to tanks so small they'd barely provide a
family with grocery money once laboriously filled.

Sign on an auction stable: "Best Little Horsehouse in
Texas." On the radio, the deejay announces that "Manhattan Model
Search is comin' to Way-co Texas to find new models for the top
agencies in New York City." New York City! Imagine that. Hail,
look where it got Cybille Shepherd. Worth a shot.

In Anson, a trim, sun-baked farm town north of Abilene, it's
time for lunch at Bea's, where the 16-seat family-style table
just inside the door makes it obvious this is where much of the
town gossips. Several people howdy me, almost as though they
assume that if I'm so far off any beaten trail, I must have a
reason to be here. They just can't rightly remember what it is,
but they'll say hello anyway. The waitress asks, in a perfect
Holly Hunter voice, "Where y'all from? Oh my God, you might just
as well stay in Texas!"

Appropriately near Justiceburg, Texas, the radical red
roadster gets its only speeding ticket of the 4,500-mile trip--a
miracle I ascribe to a good radar detector and the difficulty
police have getting microwaves to bounce back from the Corvette's
fiberglass body. Officer Massey of the Texas Highway Patrol
writes me up for 68 on a 55-mph four-lane and is so nice about it
that he even thanks me for my courtesy.

[Delia et al: If you think it's appropriate, necessary or
called- for, I could insert here several paragraphs rationalizing
my seemingly constant speeding: how I jibe it with our stupid
lack of a national energy policy, the pointlessness of fuel
conservation while 500 wells burn in Kuwait, etc. Also why I
think controlled speeding is safer--it makes you vastly more
careful and aware than are people who read magazines while they
drive a legal 55, etc.--and why police revenue collection is
directed solely at quantifiable speeding rather than inept driving,
poor lane discipline, stupidity, drunks, etc.]

Approaching Lubbock, I'm apparently atop a more productive
pool of hydrocarbons. The air is heavy with the smell of oil,
oddly industrial amid this wilderness, and more and more of the
wells are working. soon there are fields full of dozens pumping,
nodding up and down like iron chickens pecking at the dirt
in slow motion.

"Welcome to Lubbock," the clerk at the Sheraton says, "but
don't get your hopes up." I do, though, and he gives me directions
to Midnight Rodeo, a warehouse-like honky-tonk where hundreds
of handsome Texans are longneckin' and two-steppin', doing
the dance that is a cross between a waltz and a polka. They
sweep rapidly around the racetrack floor, men wearing beltbuckles
the size of portable-TV screens, women in tight jeans and colorful
boots.

When the occasional rock or disco set is played, they all
turn gawky, imitating Easterners as badly as I do Dwight Yoakum.
But the two-step, a fluid and erotic dance of four interlacing
legs, a kind of human dressage, makes even the men with big
bellies look good if their Levi's are long and tight. And if
they don't knock off their silly hats as they spin and swirl
their partners.

THE RADIO IS playing George Strait singing, "Amarillo by morning,
Amarillo's on my mind." If the music were country-and-eastern,
perhaps we'd be listening to like fantasies about Poughkeepsie,
or Stamford. Amarillo, an ordinary High Plains city of malls and
fast-food restaurants, is no less attractive or more magical than
either.

When Strait finishes, somebody advertises not a suit but for
a suit. Gentleman in Plainview, Texas wants a used black suit,
size 44. Give him a call. Funeral, I guess.

Actually, there is one famous restaurant in Amarillo: The
Big Texan Steak Ranch and Motel. "Oi read about this plyce in
the Rand- McNally and knew I 'ad to see it," says the tough-looking
young Brit accessorized with a cowboy hat, shower clogs
and a single earring.

One reason the Steak Ranch is featured in guidebooks is its
offer of a free four-and-a-half-pound steak if you can eat the
whole thing; $29.95 if you fail. The whack of raw meat, on
display at the entrance in an iced case with its only moderately
smaller normal offerings, is the size of a small ham. "A woman
from Perth, Australia three weeks ago did it plus all the trimmings,
went to the salad bar twice and then ate a bowl of strawberry
shortcake," the Stetsoned maitre'd says, "and she was thin
as anything. Thin people generally do better than fat ones."

Just west of Amarillo is one of the most recognizable road
icons in the United States: Cadillac Ranch, six tail-finned
sedans buried to their windshields in the Texas loam like a
squadron of suicidal dive bombers. Collector Stanley Marsh
commissioned the site sculpture, but Burt Fite farms the land.
"It's a bother to have to plow around them all the time," he
laughs, "but we just rent from Mr. Marsh. He pretty much put 'em
wherever he wants. No, the cows don't use them for shade, they
just rub up against 'em a lot." Will the cars eventually rust
out? "They're set in concrete, at the angle of the Pyramids or
something. They aren't gonna move." Are they ever repainted?
"Yeah, the graffiti gets pretty rank after awhile."

Two tourists arrive while I'm poking around the
Cadillacs--there's a gate in the fence and a path across Burt's
pasture--and they turn out to be yet more Britishers,
driving the length of what used to be Route 66, from Chicago to
Califor-
nia, in a Honda they're supposed to be delivering straight from
Manhattan to an anxious owner in LA. ("I called to tell him why
we were so late and fortunately got the answering machine," the
woman says.)

Why Route 66? "The music, the mythology, the whole John
Steinbeck thing," the man answers, "then five or six years ago,
there was a marvelous documentary on our TV. Even the documentary
has become part of Route 66 folklore. Everywhere we go,
people say, 'Oh you're English, the film crew was here too.'"

They lament how the Interstate has utterly marooned towns
that once prospered on old 66. "We stopped for gas in Texola,
only about half a mile from the Interstate," the man says, "and
the guy at the pumps literally went running into the station
shouting, 'There's a car! There's a car!'"

Fifty miles east of Tucumcari, New Mexico, the Corvette
enters the desert Southwest with a lurch. The flat Texas farm-land
suddenly ends, and the view expands from 20 miles in every
direction to 100. In the last afternoon light, small mesas and
buttes are washed in wonderful shades of orange and shadowy blue.
The first signpost to my ultimate destination flashes past: 1,007
miles to Los Angeles.

Nobody shouts "There's a car!" when I pull up to the Blue
Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, but the prototypical old
Route 66 palace has seen better days. There are 34 motels in
Tucumcari--the same number as in the entire city of
Albuquerque--and it is a riot of neon. But the Blue Swallow is
the oldest. "Oh, yeah, it used to be somethin' else," muses a
woman in a gas station. "It was the most famous motel around.
All kinds of famous people stayed there. Yeah, it's still doing
business--not nearly as much, but I always see people there."

"We have two types of rooms," says Lillian Redman, who has
been running the crumbling motel since 1958. "Hardwood floor and
black-and- white TV is $10. Carpeting and color is $12.50." I
go for the deluxe room, a tiny cubicle with a leaking gas heater
and wheeled TV, its cord stretching across the little alcove
containing the bureau.

Lillian scoots her wheelchair around the cluttered little
office to make change, get me a key, fetch some matches for the
heater and carefully personalize a little form letter unlike any
I've ever gotten from Mr. Marriott or even Mrs. Helmsley: "May
this room and motel be your 'second' home," it says in part.
"May those you love be near you in thoughts and dreams. Even
though we may not get to know you, we hope that you will be as
comfortable and happy as if you were in your own house."

The Blue Swallow is the only motel I've ever seen with a
garage attached to each room. It's an odd touch in a desert town
where it rarely rains, and surely it wasn't done--as a friend
later suggests--so couples could tryst with their cars hidden.
Nobody would have driven drive two days into the desert from Los
Angeles for secrecy, and the tiny, remote town of Tucumcari could
hardly have supported a hot-bed trade among its few
residents.
Some of the garages still work, others are padlocked and crumbling,
but they're all a sign that the Blue Swallow was once
"somethin' else."

SPORTS-CAR DRIVERS in much of the country never get a chance to
answer that most basic question, "Wottle she do?" but today is
the Corvette's chance to show its stuff. On empty, two-lane,
early-morning Highway 104 from Tucumcari to Las Vegas, New Mexico,
the speedometer quickly settles on 134--11 mph slower than
the car's actual top speed, but the power-sapping
altitude--probably 3,000 [?] feet--and the drag of two duffle
bags that threaten to lose their grip on the luggage rack easily
explain the difference.

The engine tinkles and pops while aluminum and iron shrink
into repose as the car sits cooling in the silent plaza of Las
Vegas, a lovely town that is becoming a retreat from the commercialism
of nearby Santa Fe and Taos. "We have 900 buildings on
the historical register, which is more than even Santa Fe has," a
clerk at the restored Plaza Hotel says.

A handsome young woman in a long, flowered skirt over silver-toed
boots reads a book while she breakfasts in a sunny
corner of the dining room, and there are hints Las Vegas is on
the cusp of discovery. It's a working-class town, though--small,
remote and insular--and there's already some resentment of the
auslanders and their historical- register/shops-and-galleries
concerns.

If Santa Fe is the specter, their fears may be well-founded.
In 15 years, the town has gone from gentle Southwestern intimacy
to concentrated Californian cuteness. Total gentrification has
brought it congestion and uniformity, with trolling shoppers
everywhere, and the core of what has become a small city is like
an extended resort-hotel shopping arcade.

It's Friday night, so a slow-moving stream of jacked-up
pickups, hoodless musclecars with their engines exposed and
stiff-gaited lowriders endlessly circles the streets,
cruisin'--the paseo on wheels. From a Camaro jammed full of
Mexican-American kids, a boy with a hugely pregnant woman sitting
on his lap asks with exaggerated politeness, "Excuse me, sir, can
you tell me the way to the Plaza?" It's several blocks away, so
I give him complex directions and even a tourist-bureau street-map.
They drive off convulsed. It's minutes before I realize
it's as though I've been asked directions to the Atlantic Ocean
by a Cape Codder standing on a sand dune.

"WE'RE FROM NEW Haven originally," says the nice lady running the
gas station with her husband, outside Durango, Colorado. "Came
out here 18 years ago on vacation and decided to stay. The dope
was just starting back East, and my lord, at the great Yale
University they were going to school with no shirts, barefoot.
We decided to get out of there. Of course, the dope is everywhere
now." There's also now a Ralph Lauren factory outlet in
Durango, once a town of saloons, brothels and miners' gang
wars.

Elevation 10,640 feet: the summit of Coal Bank Hill Pass, en
route to Telluride, deep amid the San Juan Mountains. My flat-lander's
lungs can barely support a slow stroll around the pull-off
in which I've parked the Corvette, yet as I slump back
into the seat, there's the crunch of gravel in the crisp mountain air
and I turn to watch a bicyclist pull up.

He ignores me, for this beast with bridge-cable tendons,
thighs like stumps and a heart probably the size of a basketball
has pounded up the mountain from Durango, 40 miles [?] back,
while I wimped along in my silly red convertible. He retches
painfully, upends a water bottle, spits and gasps, then turns and
begins the descent back to Durango. This is Colorado, where the
seriously bad bikers don't ride Harleys but pedal 12- and 14-speed
Merlins, Paramounts and Colnagos.

The road from Durango to Telluride is magnificent, cresting
three passes over 10,000 feet high and winding its way, guardrail-less,
through high peaks and past the old mining towns of
Silverton and Ouray. (A local I'd met in Santa Fe told me of
having done part of the trip as a human windshield wiper, during
a snowstorm, lying on the roof of a friend's VW van and reaching
down to sweep the driver's glass clear. "The things we did as
college students," he groaned.)

And the prize--the tiny ski and film-festival town of Telluride,
in a mountain cul-de-sac--is worth the effort. It's not
the poor man's Aspen, it's the rich man's Aspen. "When the
billionaires chase the millionaires out of Aspen, they'll move
here," says Gary Eschman, one of the owners of San Sophia, the
town's best inn. They already are. "Land prices are already
higher than Vail's," says his wife, Dianne. "We see a lot more
fur coats than before, and we never used to get the problem of
women guests complaining there wasn't enough space in the rooms
to put out all their makeup."

NAVAJO, FULL OF glottal stops, rising inflections and abrupt
word-endings, is English played backward. It is a discovery I
make as the Corvette approaches Monument Valley, its radio sniffing
out increasing numbers of Native American stations. In the
distance, the sandstone Goliaths of the Navajo national park on
the border of Utah and Arizona loom dimly, like a flotilla of man
o'wars on the horizon. The haze is a sandstorm, and soon the
talc-like red dust is everywhere, writhing across the road in
playful sheets, flattening the skirts of Indian women standing
resignedly next to their dust-caked trinket trays.

In one desolate spot, a Navajo is lying comfortably on his
side on a sandy bluff above the road, propping his head on an
elbow and watching the very occasional traffic. It seems as
strange as seeing somebody sleeping in the snow, but to him, red
Corvettes must be an equally odd spectacle.

A crude sign, "Dinosaur Tracks," leads to Melvin, another
Navajo. How much does it cost to see the ancient footprints?
"Whatever you want to pay," Melvin says. He leads me past his
sister's trinkets-and- jewelry shack to a series of huge chicken-tracks
that were pressed into the red stone when it was mud.
Melvin lopes goofily along one series of tracks from print to
print, demonstrating the length of the little dinosaur's
stride, and rattles off names and statistics with aplomb. he's been
doing it, he says, since he was a little boy.

The tracks were discovered in 1942, when the highway--Arizona
89-- was being built. I ask Melvin who now owns the land
they're on, but it is a baffling question for him:
"ownership" of the earth is not a Navajo concept. "Well, that's where I
live, over there," is all he can say.

Part of the fun of driving back roads is the freedom to take
the time to find the offbeat places to stay, but this is ridiculous.
The gas gauge is banging its peg and the "reserve" light
is glowing, and I'm heading off into the desert, on a dirt road,
searching for the resort Enchantment, outside--way outside, by
Eastern standards--Sedona, Arizona.

Finally, two mountain bikers turn me back the right way.
"Yeah, we keep putting up signs. We're in the middle of the
Coconino National Forest, so the rangers keep taking them down,"
says the bellman at the resort. Enchantment may forever be hard
to find, but it's worth the detour--a cluster of luxurious pseudo-adobe
"casitas" snug in a canyon of the vivid red rock that is
Sedona's stock in trade. Tennis, golf, pool-lazing and other
pastimes of little use to the gotta-make-it-to- California motor-head
predominate, but it's a splendid place to wash a Monument
Valley sandstorm out of your scalp.

JEROME, ARIZONA ISN'T even on my map: a town of 480 that has
lapsed some in population from its 1929 high of 15,000 but that
has gained in grace. Jerome is staked to the side of a mountain
thousands of feet above a hot valley floor that stretches toward
Phoenix, 80 miles to the south, and in ways it is oddly like an
Italian hill town. Its main street is the vertiginous switch-backs
of Highway A89, and flights of stairs lead from one level
to the next, where tottery, stilt-built houses threaten to slide
all the way down to Sedona.

Today the tiny town is an open-air museum of sorts, an
entertaining ghost displaying the artifacts of its past as the
site of one of the world's richest copper mines. Like little
Lynchburg and striving Telluride, "the other" Las Vegas and
sleepy St. Francisville, Jerome is a town the mainliners might
miss. Yet these are the communities that make worthwhile a
westward voyage that as often heads straight north or half-south,
that gives meaning to the meander and turns a 3,000-mile trip
into 4,300.

The farther I go and the faster I drive, the more I encounter
places and people that need a longer visit, that beg you to
stop and stay. In one sense, this cross-country epic is becoming
a voyage of discovery, but in another of discoveries neither
claimed nor colonized.

The envelope, please: A89 to Arizona 71 from Clarkdale
through Jerome and on toward the "ghost town" of Congress turns
out to be the champion road of the entire trip. Sure, there have
been nice backroads, scenic parkways, vista-ed drives and irresistible
straightaways, but this simple, little-trafficked arterial
is smite- your-forehead fantastic as it winds and switch-
backs and hairpins through the mountains where I play the
double-the-sign game. (When the corner sign says 25 mph, try it at
50.)

At Congress, the lady in the convenience store says, "Ghost
town? Maybe once, but even then it wasn't nothin' I'd call a
ghost town. Whoever made the map decided to put 'ghost
town' on it, and we've had to live with it ever since. But a whole lot of
people moved in, and the ghosts moved out."

A89 and 71 will turn out to be the end of the line for this
cross- country journey's good roads. Southwest of Congress, the
highway straightens. Straightens? Hell, it turns into God's own
ruler, into blacktop infinity. Far ahead, the road disappears
into a gelatinous Lawrence of Arabia mirage, and I half-expect
Omar Sharif's camel to come trotting out of the shimmering band
of not-sky, not-earth.

Beyond the camel is dreary Interstate 10 to Los Angeles, the
only road through the numbing Sonoran Desert. Playing with the
cruise control and the seat's lumbar-support air pump for five
hours is the best to be hoped for. And for the first time, the
Corvette's top goes up not because it's too cold but too hot.

California! No need for a sign, I know it by the Botts
Dots--the lumpy little tire-whapping ceramic buttons that a one-time
section head of California's Division of Highways, Dr.
Elbert Botts, invented to serve as the state's highway lane
dividers. (I once had a friend who could turn the simplest
California drive into torture by proving how skillfully he could
keep his lefthand tires on the Botts Dots line with an endless
series of BLAPadapadapadap-BLAPadapadpadaps.)

"You'll love Palm Springs," said another friend, who plays
golf. I hate Palm Springs. I do not play golf, and the charming
desert- resort town I'd naively expected turns out to be a mega-mall
posing as a city. "Are you looking for a gay resort?" asks
the young jogger I'd hoped could direct me to a Palm Springs inn
I'd chosen from a B&B guide. "Because they're all in that part
of town." After a moment of shock and an awkward, "Uh, no," I
can marvel at the refreshing openness of a query presented as
forthrightly as he might have asked whether I was looking for
French food or Mexican, "because they're all in that part of
town." Hey dude, this is California.

THIRTY YEARS AGO, I last rode a roller-coaster: the creaky old
Cyclone, the scream-soaked pile of lumber and tracks that made
Coney Island famous. Today I ride another. Since this has been
a journey of eclectic destinations and personal choices, the
Corvette ends up nowhere so simple as downtown Los Angeles or
with one tire in the Pacific but 45 minutes north of the city, at
the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park. Magic Mountain has
the Psyclone, a Cyclone clone that is a near-exact replica of
Coney Island's long-closed terror ride.

The Psyclone is closed, too. Computer trouble--a problem
Coney Island never suffered. "We're still learning this one,"
says Magic Mountain's chief of operations, Fred Svendsen. "It
opened only a month ago. Because it was built during a very damp
period, it's going through tremendous dimensional changes as the
wood dries out." (Oh, good.) "The track gauge is changing all
the time, and we're still learning what the section
speeds
should be. There can be big differences in speeds between a slow
day and a fast day: 63, 65 mph on a day when it's hot and dry, as
much as 10 mph less on a day when the track gauge tightens up.
On the steel coasters, moisture is what makes 'em go
faster, I think because the wheels hydroplane when the track gets wet."

The Viper is a steel coaster, one of the new generation of
pseudo- aerobatic thrill rides, and I am condemned to ride it in
lieu of the Psyclone. "You're lucky, actually," says a Magic
Mountain employee. "This is the longest looping roller coaster
in the world."

"Put this gentleman in the front seat," he says to the
Viper's operator as I'm led around the hour-long line of waiting
customers, all teenagers, many of them tough-looking Chicanos.
Not a one protests this droigt du seigneur. They probably assume
a middle-aged, white- haired male wearing glasses and cowboy
boots can only be a government inspector or an officer of the
roller-coaster police.

Ninety seconds later, I climb off the Viper grinning foolishly.
Maybe I'm grinning because I didn't have to wait in line
40 times longer than the ride takes, but I'm also grinning with a
combination of relief and surprise: it was fun, and more amusing
than terrifying. An 18-story plummet, three loops, an Immelmann,
a barrel roll and a couple of other thundering maneuvers forgotten
in the rush....It's over, almost as quickly as the words can
be read.

So is the Corvette's journey, though that has taken 4,318
miles, 14 states, and 100 hours and 57 minutes of traveling
(including roadside stops). The fantasy trip, the Big Cross-Country,
has become reality, something that only an American can
accomplish so routinely. Not once in 14 days have I encountered
anyone who has expressed anything but envy and delight at
the thought of a footloose two weeks on cross-country backroads.
At its worst, the trip has been why-am-I- doing-this
boredom--driving on roads that are too long, too dull; eating in
restaurants you'd never otherwise choose; and staying in places
you're happy to leave. At its best, it has been the discovery
that much of the country is in better shape physically, emotionally,
even economically than the doomsayers would have us think.
It's a land of enormous beauty in unexpected places--Tennessee,
for one; Mississippi; the remote southwest corner of
Colorado--and it's a land of people so welcoming and open that an
Easterner's natural defenses are breached by the first "Y'all
come back" and overrun by every "Thanks for stoppin' by." If
I've learned anything, it's that I want to do it again. Slower.

From my small stock of road music for the Corvette's splendid
CD player, I choose the Traveling Wilburys and hear them sing
the perfect end to my trip: